Gizmodo on how Yahoo killed Flickr, “The first community problems became evident when Yahoo decided all existing Flickr users would need a Yahoo account to log in. That switchover occurred in 2007, and was part of the CorpDev integration process to establish a single sign on. Flickr set it to go live on the Ides of March.”

The single sign on never worked, for either Flickr or Upcoming. I had accounts on both, and a Yahoo mail account. Once the single sign on began rolling out, I could no longer access either my Flickr or Upcoming accounts.

Flickr was one of the most beautiful spaces ever created on the internet. Yahoo killed it with ugly and stupid.

It wasn’t just companies that Yahoo bought that they crippled. The had Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Groups was, around 2004 or so, really the killer app of the Internet. Email had become ubiquitous, but sharing among more than a couple of people was problematic and Usenet groups required too much investment for most people and were starting to fade. Yahoo Groups solved these problems. There was a huge market for sharing.

Yahoo was trying to compete in search, but they never searched their own public groups, and the search in private groups was (still is?) atrocious. Plus they cluelessly took away web access unless you had an Yahoo email.

This is not a case of business over art either. If it were business, you make it easier for your customers to use your product, not harder.

(Apparently, you no longer need to sign on to Flickr with your Yahoo email address. I wonder about Yahoo groups? It’s too late for Upcoming? Is del.icio.us dead too? )

“Associations with a :through option can now use any association as the through or source association, including other associations which have a :through option and has_and_belongs_to_many associations.”

When using nested association, you will not be able to modify the association because there is not enough information to know what modification to make. For example, if you tried to add a Commenter in the example above, there would be no way to tell how to set up the intermediate Post and Comment objects.

so you can’t do @author.commenters << Comment.new, but still this is a nice savings for some deeply nested associations that I’ve been dealing with lately.

“That was one of the most disturbing things I experienced,” Esbati said. “She kept repeating that ‘If I die now, just remember you are all fantastic.’ And this was a girl of 18 or 19 years old, and she … was repeating that ‘I can see in your eyes that you are afraid, so I know I will die.”

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.